Conservative legal activist Larry Klayman got into an argument on CNN with host Don Lemon and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin when he was brought on to discuss his victory this week in a lawsuit challenging NSA surveillance, resulting in Lemon cutting him off the screen and Klayman comparing Lemon to disgraced former MSNBC host Martin Bashir.

Klayman’s appearance Tuesday night on CNN was preceded by a profile of him that included a quotation from a former George W. Bush staffer saying his lawsuits were about “fighting for himself and his own, in my opinion, delusions of grandeur.”

When Klayman was brought into the conversation, he came out firing.

“I think it is important to note that you’re a big supporter of Obama,” Klayman said to Lemon. “That you have favored him in every respect. You have to try to do a hit piece to diminish a very important decision.”

I think it is unquestionable that Lemon is a left-wing, ruling class mouthpiece. That’s his job. That’s CNN’s mission (and Klayman’s flattery of CNN to claim that Lemon is unworthy of the network seems silly to me).

What I find interesting is that Lemon, rather than focusing a report on the wonderful victory for civil liberties against the NSA had to take time to demean Klayman. Is the Left afraid that, with the tea party and Rand Paul, the populace might learn that the right wing has a cogent critique and committed opposition to violations of rights by the government?

It is telling that he demeaning statement that was used came from a Bush staffer.

The comments by the “legal analyst” are also fascination and informative:

“This case is based on Larry Klayman’s tin-foil hat paranoia about the NSA being after him. He had some fantasy that the NSA was after him. This case is not about Larry Klayman, it’s about the metadata program that affects everybody, but the idea that Larry Klayman is the representative is simply outrageous,” Toobin said. “He is a professional litigant and lunatic who should not be a representative of the very important issues of this case.”

First of all, Toobin provided no proof that Klayman’s claims of NSA harassment were false. He’s simply assuming that the NSA would never do any such thing. But if the NSA wanted to both harass Klayman and make him look unreliable they would do something implausible in order to hurt his reputation. Surely no one is going to claim that the NSA is too ethical to harass a witness. Please read the history of, say, the CIA, the FBI, the use of the “Fairness Doctrine,” etc, etc, etc, at your leisure.

Secondly, notice the class snobbery. Toobin is an important and respectable “legal analyst” while Klayman is merely “a professional litigant.”

But neither Toobin nor anyone else like him has done a thing to actually fight against the NSA. No, we owe our only court victory to the “lunatic” with the “tin-foil hat.”

If I want people to merely talk about the NSA, there are lots of leftists out there. But to actually get something done takes a right-wing activist.